Agnes Denes (1931, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born American artist based in New York. In her protean artistic practice unfolding since the 1960s, she has been embracing philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, history, sociology, poetry and music, closely intertwining science and art in a subtle mystery of knowledge. Considered as visionary, her visual investigations and formulations range from writings, drawings and sculpture to environmental actions, performances and installations. Acb is proud to present a selection of works that embraces 50 years of creation and that receives focus for the first time after the artist’s retrospective exhibition hosted by Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2008-2009.

The exhibition was realized in cooperation with Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Hajnalka Tarr has been interested in the visual manifestation of reality since the beginnings. From her drawings, installations and photo-based works unfolds the fundamental desire for a tangible truth, which, in turn, is constantly confronted with the emotionally affected reality of the conscious mind. In her latest photo series, she uses her relation to objects to define her place in the visual, logical order created by her. The artist herself is the central motif of the pieces constructed by a fixed structural logic. As one of the most obvious forms of self-representation, the nude is augmented by an array of objects from the immediate surroundings of the artist in her series of photographs. Each piece comprises an image of the artist intertwined with the image of an object assigned to it, this way interpreting the psychological idea of ‘object relations’, referring to multilayered interaction between the individual and the surrounding world.

Ferenc Nemes (1949, Dunaföldvár) was greatly influenced by Tibor Csiky, his dorm-teacher and master at the Polytechnic School of Wood Industry in Budapest from 1964, who inspired him and his friend Árpád Fenyvesi Tóth to create their first artworks. Nemes became interested in concrete poetry at a very young age, inspired by Kassák and Dadaism. From 1968 he worked on graphic series addressing the phenomenon of interference, chaos theory and multivariable mathematical systems.
The exhibition at acb NA focuses on works created by Nemes in the 1960s through 80s, presenting his concrete poetry, paper works, small sculptures, his delicate silk pictures from the 1980s, and even his large black relief, bringing attention, among other things, to his astonishing endeavours in structuralist wood sculpture.